Agency Targets 50m Children For Immunisation

Executive Director National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Ado Mohammed says 50 million children were to be immunised in the just concludednationwide exercise.

Mohammed told newsmen in Abuja on recently that the exercise was to run through February 18 to February 21, 2012.

“For this round, it’s nationwide involving the 36 states and the FCT, and we are targeting 50million children.”

“The vaccines for the exercise have been delivered to the various states and we have 65 million doses of Bivalent oral polio vaccine (OPV).’’

He said there had been lot of advocacy build-up across the country, adding that the just-concluded meeting by the Northern Traditional Leaders was part of it.

The executive director said the vaccinators and supervisors had also been trained for the exercise, adding that the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) would be used to keep track of the vaccinators.

“This is because people report back to us as part of the solution, that when vaccinators go to the field, they do not actually immunise children, so we are tackling that.”

Our reports that the last nationwide exercise was conducted in January and in February, 2011, during which eight exercises were also conducted but restricted to the northern part of the country, owing to higher prevalence of polio.

As at November, 2011, the country recorded 43 cases of wild poliovirus compared to 14 cases in the same time period in 2010